Indian medicine, at 1/100th cost, saves Aussie's life

Their shares slipped 2.3 per cent to 2,551 rupees, adding to their 4.1 per cent fall on Tuesday. Less than four months ago, Greg Jeffery was on the verge of getting liver cirrhosis. The 61-year-old Australian, suffering from hepatitis C, desperately needed a drug called Sivoldi to reverse the life-threatening condition.

The problem was, each Sivoldi pill cost over 1,000 Australian dollars and the total treatment regime of 84 tablets would have set him back by around 100,000 dollars.

Jeffery, a historian and author, didn't have that kind of money. Desperate to source the drug at a cheaper rate, he landed in Chennai three months ago. There, he not only got the drug but bought it for less than one-tenth the price in Australia.

"The same treatment with the same drug in India is $900," Jeffery told Australian TV channel, ABC.

" Basically as soon as I got home I started taking it. Within 11 days all my liver functions had returned to normal and within four weeks there was no virus detectable in my blood — I was essentially cured," he told the channel.

Jeffery's story, now all over Australian media, has renewed the debate on whether life-saving drugs should be priced so high.

" If you haven't got the money, for a lot of people it's a death sentence — you die," Jeffery told ABC. " I was right on the edge of cirrhosis of the liver, once you get cirrhosis you then open up to tumours and cancer."

And just like the protagonist of Hollywood movie Dallas Buyers Club, Jeffery is now helping other Australians in a similar situation to source the drug from India.

" I get about 40 to 50 emails every day, seven days a week and they are from people who have hep C, whose mother or father has hep C, wife or husband has hep C," he told the channel.

The story is also a vindication of sorts for India's patent regime that is often criticized in the West for not honouring intellectual property rights in medicine.

In January this year, India's patent office rejected the patent application for Sovaldi (chemical name sofosbuvir) from US pharma giant Gilead Sciences on the ground that there was little evidence to show that " minor changes in the molecule" had substantially improved the drug.

What made the ruling possible was a controversial provision in India's law that says patent applications can be turned down if they fail to show sufficient novelty and inventive steps.

The decision opened the doors for Indian manufacturers to copy the drug and sell it cheaply. According to one report, 10 Indian companies were now making sofosbuvir. Two Hyderabad-based companies have reportedly priced their copied version at a retail price of Rs 19,900 per bottle of 28 tablets of 400 mg dosage, which is one-90th of Gilead's price.

Earlier, a study from Liverpool University had claimed that sofosbuvir could be produced for as little as $101 for a three-month treatment course.